The new bill is estimated to cut farmers' profits by 57 percent by 2035. (Source: FreePeople Blog)

Want to stop an unverified theory? Be prepared to pay up...

Proponents of the AGW theory have always viewed the United Nations as a sterling example of action at any cost. The UN's IPCC, chaired by Rajendra Pachauri, an Indian economist with no formal climatology training, has made extraordinary demands, such as suggesting that the world's citizens give up meat consumption to fight climate change.

Perhaps, those who believe that we must sacrifice the standard of living of our citizens to stop theoretical climate change should now look to the U.S. for guidance.

The Democratic controlled Congress is currently considering the Waxman-Markey bill, a measure praised by President Obama. Obama states that the bill will "create millions of new jobs all across America." However, the bill will likely increase yearly power bills of the average U.S. citizen by as much as $1,600, according to the US News & World Report. Further, it will like have deleterious effects on American agriculture.

The bill seeks to replace carbon taxes with a "free market" where carbon credits are auctioned and traded. The government says the bill will create a $60B USD artificial "free market" and will cut carbon emissions by 15 percent by 2020.

However, the Congressional Budget Office warns that the cost of this market will be "passed along to consumers of energy and energy-intensive products." The CBO says that the bill will particularly impact low income households.

Gary Swan, Director of Governmental Affairs and Communications with the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau, says the bill will spell disaster for hard-working farmers as well. States Swan, "On average, 65 percent of farmers' input costs are fuel, electricity, fertilizer and chemicals."

According to the Heritage Foundation, under the bill gasoline and diesel costs would grow 58 percent by 2035. This, combined with higher prices on farm equipment, would drop farm profits by 28 percent by 2012 and by 57 percent by 2035.

The Heritage Foundation estimates that the bill will leave America $9.4 trillion poorer by 2035. AGW supporters, though, argue that Americans must endure any amount of pain and economic hardship in years ahead to stop climate change.

Meanwhile, the accuracy of AGW theory continues to be debated. Several recent studies have suggested that the sun may have a larger role than man in climate change. Even a 2008 NASA study acknowledged that the solar activity caused past climate change, though it failed to make the easy connection between the sharp increase in solar activity in the 1990s to current climate change.

In other news, alarmists now a new fear to race to prevent -- French astronomers using "arcane math" methods predicted that there's a 1 in 100 chance that the Earth could collide with Mars in the next 5 billion years.

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And one does not study climate change by looking at 10 years. You have to look at 10s of thousands of years. And when you do you see that the climate has been hotter and cooler than it is now. As well as widely varying levels of CO2. Yet life prospered and in the past 5,000 years we've gone from the spear to the tactical nuke.

But FIT, 10,000 years is before I was born and intelligent people could not have possibly existed before I was born. Not to mention, there were no Hummers 10,000 years ago and those vehicles are the cause of global warming.

quote: CO2 is a scapegoat because it's the largest MAN-MADE greenhouse gas in terms of the greenhouse effect. However, at 26% that's a pittance. More importantly, studies show that N2O has a longer lasting effect on global warming than CO2 does. Over 20 years N2O has 289 times the global warming potential of CO2; over 100 years N2O has 298 times the global warming potential of CO2!!! That means that all naturally occurring greenhouse gases are worse than the man-made gases.

I am being most sincere now: Is this a joke?

From the (excellent) article you linked to :"The primary driver for the industrial era increase of N2O wasconcluded to be enhanced microbial production in expandingand fertilized agricultural lands.Ice core data for N2O have been reported extending back2,000 years and more before present (MacFarling Meure etal., 2006; Section 6.6). These data, as for CO2 and CH4, showrelatively little changes in mixing ratios over the fi rst 1,800years of this record, and then exhibit a relatively rapid rise ("

In other words, every greenhouse gas that's rapidly increasing is doing so thanks to humans.